NLP Sports Training and Coaching Tips for Performance Coaching

Unless you’ve been living in a hole in the ground, it won’t have escaped your notice that David Beckham is injured. He’s now facing six months of rehabilitation before he’ll be back to fitness. How must he be feeling? As a professional player, football is his entire life. His every waking moment revolves around football, so what happens when there’s no football?

At any level of involvement, a sports injury that prevents you from doing what you normally do is extremely frustrating. Even if you normally just meet up with the lads for a kick-about once a week, an injury takes away your ability to play, to get some exercise, and to socialise in the process - it affects your life in many ways.

David Doermann of the University of Utah in the USA describes the emotional effects of long-term sports injury rehabilitation as being similar to the ‘five stages of grief.’

1. Denial
Especially at elite level, a sportsperson considers themselves to be ‘superior’ in terms of physical strength - it’s just not possible that they could be injured.

2. Anger
The realisation that they are injured leads to anger, a period of being angry at themselves for having allowed the injury to occur.

3. Bargaining
At this stage, an injured athlete will try desperately to speed up their return to play by attempting to bargain with absolutely everyone. They’ll plead with the physio, the coach, and passers-by in the street to be able to return to training - “if I do this exercise for a whole week, can I try playing next week?”

4. Depression
As the weeks of enforced rest continue, a player begins to feel sorry for themselves and can become increasingly withdrawn as they feel out of sorts with life. It’s at this stage, a player might lose hope of ever fully recovering and give up on their sport completely.

5. Acceptance
At this final stage of acceptance, a player realises that focussing on the physical rehabilitation process is the way forward.

To be able to make the leap from ‘depression’ to ‘acceptance’ takes considerable strength of character. The most important factor contributing to psychological acceptance - and therefore recovery - is mental skill training. Only a matter of days after surgery on his Achilles, a statement from David Beckham’s club said: “The rehabilitation plan has been established and will start immediately.” That’s the key right there, the ‘plan.’

The most effective way to recover from injury and to remain positive and motivated throughout the rehabilitation process is to use the sports psychology technique of goal setting. Just as a player uses goal setting to get them to peak match fitness, the goal setting process can also take them from injury to recovery.

David Beckham may miss out on the World Cup finals but his focus will not be on missed opportunities, it will be firmly fixed on the opportunities that are yet to come his way as he makes a full recovery.

One newspaper report read…

“If there’s one thing we’ve learnt about the man, it’s never write him off”

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